Yesterday (29th August 2020) I took my first trip back to Thorpe Park for the 2020 season!
I got there in good timing (around 9:15 or so) as I had to pick up my new Merlin Annual Pass as the one I had with the extended date is due to expire next week. This means, I have another 12 months of Merlin Fun ahead!
The queues at that point to get into Thorpe Park weren’t bad, on arrival I had my temperature taken and then went through a metal detector which they put in recently.
After this, I was through into the ‘Dome’ (normally you wouldn’t get into there until 9:45am, but this will be to stop crowds gathering) I then got onto my first ride before 10am and enjoyed a few rides before going onto the rollercoaster.
The first Rollercoaster that I got onto for the day was Colossus, now as they don’t have fast-track currently I had to queue up so was over an hours wait for the ride so by the time I had gone on this and had a wonder around, it was time for lunch!
After lunch, I went over to Saw: The Ride which had over a 100 minute wait to ride (which wasn’t bad as it let my food settle down before I went onto it!).
By this time, I had then went over to The Swarm (my favourite rollercoaster at Thope Park!) and then by this time, I had enough time to do another ride on a rollercoaster (due to the queue times) so I went over to Stealth.
After this, I could have got another ride that didn’t have too bad of a queue time, but decided not to as wanted to also ensure that I wasn’t going to be on trains with alot of people so headed back on the trains.
Overall the day wasn’t bad, it was for me very nice to be back at Thorpe Park again and having the buzz of walking across the bridge.
With it being a weekend, it was busy so the bigger rides were 100+ minutes wait.
Some area’s were disappointing where people were not social distancing infact, some were getting up- to the ‘normal’ closeness which wasn’t good.
Rides were given a deep clean every so often, infact with the queue times, when I was waiting did see one of the rides get deep-cleaned twice which was re-assuring.
It was a shame for the general public, who allot of were not social distancing, it seems that they completely forgot you are supposed to be as much as there was signs advising of this.
On rides, they were strict with face-masks not starting rides if you didn’t have it on or asking you to leave the ride if you didn’t have it.
I am going back to Thorpe Park in two weeks time during the week when I’m off work, so this should be good since the queues should be not so bad as the schools will also be back.
Founder of ThemeParkRM. Spending most of his time at Thorpe Park and loves The Runaway Mine Train at Alton Towers (choo choo!)